What is SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)
New to Agile? Looking to scale Agile for larger organizations?
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) offers guidelines to assist organizations scale their agile practices while providing alignment, collaboration, and solid business outcomes.
The principles, processes, and best practices surrounding the Scaled Agile Framework allow larger organizations to adopt Agile methodologies, like Lean, Scrum and Kanban, to provide their services faster and deliver higher-quality products. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is desirable for organizations involving multiple large teams, enabling them to manage projects with greater agility while allowing stakeholders to get feedback faster.
Want to learn how SAFe improves your development and go to market strategies?
How Do I Get Started with SAFe
Ready to get started with SAFe? What should you do next?
The first piece of advice is… be sure that you are following the proven steps and find a SAFe partner that can truly guide you.
SAFe introduces a new way of working in your organization. Many companies start with a small set of teams, while others launch several teams at once. Ready to start on the first portion of the SAFe Implementation Roadmap?
- Set the strategy,
- Find a strong Coach,
- Establish a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), and
- Identify your first Pilot.
Want to understand how our team can assist you, contact us today!
Technology Strategy vs Business Strategy
We hear this question a great deal and it is not a chicken and the egg story!
Your business strategy comes first defining your company’s goals while the technology strategy defines how your technology teams help to achieve those goals. The technology strategy follows a similar template to that of other business strategies and provides the detail necessary for IT to develop the product pipeline in compliance with the business strategy.
Successfully adopting Agile and SAFe affects both the technology team as well as all parts of the organization from marketing to operations, finance, legal, HR, leadership etc. All areas of the business are able to utilize these foundations to see how this new Agile way of working improves outcomes across all business areas.
Program implement planning is one of the more important parts of your business strategy, and can end up being a very overwhelming time for an organization. With lots of coordination, communication, and teamwork required to make it successful, it is important to make it manageable for all parties. Frameworx can come in, learn your organization, meet with key stakeholders, and facilitate the entire meeting on-site or virtually.
Let’s talk about applying the technology strategy to your business strategy. Click here.
Why choose Softworld Frameworx
- Domain expertise. Our team has extensive hands-on expertise across a wide array of industries and a true depth of knowledge in SAFe.
- Guided Approach. We begin by understanding your goals, both short- and long-term, to walk you in a successful direction.
- The Talent You Need. Because of the talent we have on staff and in our network, we are able to provide team members fast…typically in 24 to 48 hours.
- Proven Process. From coaching to consulting to additional team resources, we understand the journey you are on and have a dedicated process to guide you.
Ready to learn more?
Frameworx Agile Case Study
-
CLIENT SITUATION
-
CHALLENGES
-
OUR SOLUTION
-
KEY BENEFITS
Our client, a Fortune 100 financial services firm, was experiencing rapid growth in their banking division. With this growth, scrutiny from federal regulators increased for the bank resulting in a substantial list of audit points to address. For years, they had been working on improvements to their technology stack and now with the audit results, they found themselves in a situation that required them to expedite their technology improvements.
They needed to resolve the compliance issues in a timely manner, and they wanted to evolve from their legacy architecture. Additionally, they wanted to adopt new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The client was already utilizing SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) and needed to bring on multiple SAFe teams to deploy to different Release Trains.
- Lacked development team capacity to meet spikes in demand
- Needed a trusted SAFe partner
- Regulatory compliance across the application portfolio
- Accelerate transition to the new enterprise architecture platform
- Digital transformations and improved channel capabilities
- Introduction of new technologies for managing unstructured data, managing meta data and measuring/improving data quality
Working with the client, we partnered to match capacity to demand. It was determined that 15 teams needed to be created with roughly 8 - 10 members in each. Each team member received SAFe training so that the delivery mechanism matched the client’s way of working. The teams were deployed to their release trains and began sprints immediately.
We also needed to address the challenge of where to locate the staff as this work needed to be performed in large part onsite.
The Softworld Onshore Development Center (ODC) was placed within two blocks of the client’s location. Proximity to the client’s development teams was desired, which provided the space relief needed while also enabling face-to-face project collaboration in their Agile (SAFe) environment. This Softworld ODC solution provided our client with 129 consultants working on Agile teams comprised of Technical Leads, Software (primarily Java) Developers, Scrum Masters, and an Enterprise Architect.
A Service Level Objective (SLO) based agreement was created which defined key metrics used to manage performance of the ODC. Our teams worked on both the legacy platform and the new enterprise platform with a conscious effort to expose all teams to the new modern architecture.
This approach provided versatility amongst the teams and also fostered a high level of engagement on the new platform.
The teams joined various release trains from Omni-Channel to Credit Card to Loans to Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer (AML / KYC) and more. The teams participated in SAFe ceremonies including Program Increment (PI) Planning, with output captured by the Scrum Masters in Jira. As software was delivered and work was reprioritized, the capacity was load balanced. Because of the fungible nature of the SAFe Teams, we were able to plug the SAFe teams into different release trains. In this way, they were up to speed on the client’s methodologies and started delivering value on the new trains immediately.
Over the three-year engagement, our teams were able to complete 183 program increments (PIs) and address all of the audit concerns without penalties. They were able to bring the new architecture online and begin utilizing the new technology to enhance the experience with their members.
- All audit points were successfully addressed, resulting in the prevention of tens of millions of dollars in fines.
- Implemented new business functionality. As an example, an Omni-channel platform was added allowing them modern approaches to interacting with their members both from a Member Support perspective as well as Marketing.
- Over 183 Program Increments (PIs) and more than 500 Epics were completed.
- Over 400 features were added to the client’s production environment.
- The proximity of the ODC proved to be highly effective, with greater productivity and results than the client experienced, in the past, with their offshore teams.
- Our client hired more than 40 of our consultants to become their employees
- Through collaboration with the client, a level of maturity was reached where the client was able to refine two sprint’s worth of user stories which the Frameworx team was able to pull from.
